The Hand That Rocks The Cradle

The Hand That Rocks the Cradle

Sukey was a feminist long before it was fashionable. In an age when girls were raised to please husbands and birth babies, she had bigger dreams. Her doting daddy treated her more like a son than a daughter. While other girls were learning how to cook and sew, he taught her Latin and Greek. When ladies retired to the parlor after dinner, she joined the men in the library.

Because she was allowed to soar intellectually, Sukey set her heart on publishing poetry a century before Jane Austen broke the gender barrier, and she fantasized about being the first woman admitted to Oxford. But her father clipped her wings by forcing her to marry Samuel, a mediocre preacher. She would spend her marriage in rural parishes with country bumpkins.

Their first parish was a dreary village with a mud cottage manse. She gave birth to seven children, only to watch three of them die. A careless midwife maimed the seventh for life. After six difficult pregnancies in eight years, Sukey almost died of exhaustion.

Things looked up when they were called to a richer parish. But Samuel managed money as badly as he preached. When their eighth child was born, he took to the road to earn extra income. He returned home enough times to sire five more children, who all died in infancy. After their manse burned down, Samuel abandoned his family. When he finally returned, Sukey birthed five more babies in rapid succession. He left it to her to educate their passel of kids. Both sons and daughters got as fine an education as the young scholars at Oxford.

When he was sixty-five, Samuel suffered a stroke. Sukey cared for him for seven years while they survived on charity. The feminist who dreamed of publishing poetry spent her life in obscurity. She gave birth to nineteen children, burying eight of them in infancy. Only seven were still alive when she died. You might be tempted to weep for her if you didn’t know the rest of her story.

Her daddy nicknamed her Sukey. But history remembers her by her given name, Susanna, the wife of the Reverend Samuel Wesley. One of her sons, John, sparked a great revival in colonial America that birthed the Revolutionary War. Along the way, he founded the Methodist Church. Another son, Charles, penned more than nine thousand poems and hymns. Samuel Jr. became one of England’s greatest scholars. Hetty became the poet her mother was never allowed to be. Two other daughters were prominent educators. All of Sukey’s dreams, and so much more, were realized through the children she nurtured and inspired. One might argue that there would be no United States had there been no Susanna Wesley. Certainly, millions owe their spiritual lives to that woman.

Do you see your story in Sukey’s disappointments? Have your dreams been dashed or your hopes postponed? Maybe life has deposited you at a wide spot on the road to nowhere. Is it possible that God has placed you here for bigger purposes than you can dare imagine? Take heart from Susanna Wesley’s story:

God’s gifts put our best dreams to shame.

“I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

Jeremiah 29:11, NIV